Here I am, a seasoned writer with decades of work on writing and teaching behind me, and this is my first engagement with the world of blogging. I have an important reason for this: my book, Write Your Self, is soon to appear from MX Publishing, and this entails my revisiting my teaching career.
This is because, around fifteen years ago, I was marking hundreds of first-year university scripts on a creative writing degree. They were, almost without exception, about unhappiness. Students saw writing as an opportunity to dissect their misery. I concluded that writing happiness was hard-much more difficult than writing misery.
I decided to write something about this, and what happened was my discovery of journaling: a method of writing about yourself with prompts from an author. The aim is to look at your life through suggestions from a tutor you never see or meet. But everything is about writing positive, refreshing things.
I'm now hoping that the new book generates smiles.